I.

“THERE are several objections to it, but I’ll take it if you’ll alter

it,” Mr. Locket’s rather curt note had said; and there was no waste of

words in the postscript in which he had added: “If you’ll come in and see

me, I’ll show you what I mean.” This communication had reached Jersey

Villas by the first post, and Peter Baron had scarcely swallowed his

leathery muffin before he got into motion to obey the editorial behest.

He knew that such precipitation looked eager, and he had no desire to

look eager—it was not in his interest; but how could he maintain a

godlike calm, principled though he was in favour of it, the first time

one of the great magazines had accepted, even with a cruel reservation, a

specimen of his ardent young genius?

It was not till, like a child with a sea-shell at his ear, he began to be

aware of the great roar of the “underground,” that, in his third-class

carriage, the cruelty of the reservation penetrated, with the taste of

acrid smoke, to his inner sense. It was really degrading to be eager in

the face of having to “alter.” Peter Baron tried to figure to himself at

that moment that he was not flying to betray the extremity of his need,

but hurrying to fight for some of those passages of superior boldness

which were exactly what the conductor of the “Promiscuous Review” would

be sure to be down upon. He made believe—as if to the greasy

fellow-passenger opposite—that he felt indignant; but he saw that to the

small round eye of this still more downtrodden brother he represented

selfish success. He would have liked to linger in the conception that he

had been “approached” by the Promiscuous; but whatever might be thought

in the office of that periodical of some of his flights of fancy, there

was no want of vividness in his occasional suspicion that he passed there

for a familiar bore. The only thing that was clearly flattering was the

fact that the Promiscuous rarely published fiction. He should therefore

be associated with a deviation from a solemn habit, and that would more

than make up to him for a phrase in one of Mr. Locket’s inexorable

earlier notes, a phrase which still rankled, about his showing no symptom

of the faculty really creative. “You don’t seem able to keep a character

together,” this pitiless monitor had somewhere else remarked. Peter

Baron, as he sat in his corner while the train stopped, considered, in

the befogged gaslight, the bookstall standard of literature and asked

himself whose character had fallen to pieces now. Tormenting indeed had

always seemed to him such a fate as to have the creative head without the

creative hand.

It should be mentioned, however, that before he started on his mission to

Mr. Locket his attention had been briefly engaged by an incident

occurring at Jersey Villas. On leaving the house (he lived at No. 3,

the door of which stood open to a small front garden), he encountered the

lady who, a week before, had taken possession of the rooms on the ground

floor, the “parlours” of Mrs. Bundy’s terminology. He had heard her, and

from his window, two or three times, had even seen her pass in and out,

and this observation had created in his mind a vague prejudice in her

favour. Such a prejudice, it was true, had been subjected to a violent

test; it had been fairly apparent that she had a light step, but it was

still less to be overlooked that she had a cottage piano. She had

furthermore a little boy and a very sweet voice, of which Peter Baron had

caught the accent, not from her singing (for she only played), but from

her gay admonitions to her child, whom she occasionally allowed to amuse

himself—under restrictions very publicly enforced—in the tiny black patch

which, as a forecourt to each house, was held, in the humble row, to be a

feature. Jersey Villas stood in pairs, semi-detached, and Mrs.

Ryves—such was the name under which the new lodger presented herself—had

been admitted to the house as confessedly musical. Mrs. Bundy, the

earnest proprietress of No. 3, who considered her “parlours” (they were a

dozen feet square), even more attractive, if possible, than the second

floor with which Baron had had to content himself—Mrs. Bundy, who

reserved the drawing-room for a casual dressmaking business, had threshed

out the subject of the new lodger in advance with our young man,

reminding him that her affection for his own person was a proof that,

other things being equal, she positively preferred tenants who were

clever.

This was the case with Mrs. Ryves; she had satisfied Mrs. Bundy that she

was not a simple strummer. Mrs. Bundy admitted to Peter Baron that, for

herself, she had a weakness for a pretty tune, and Peter could honestly

reply that his ear was equally sensitive. Everything would depend on the

“touch” of their inmate. Mrs. Ryves’s piano would blight his existence

if her hand should prove heavy or her selections vulgar; but if she

played agreeable things and played them in an agreeable way she would

render him rather a service while he smoked the pipe of “form.” Mrs.

Bundy, who wanted to let her rooms, guaranteed on the part of the

stranger a first-class talent, and Mrs. Ryves, who evidently knew

thoroughly what she was about, had not falsified this somewhat rash

prediction. She never played in the morning, which was Baron’s

working-time, and he found himself listening with pleasure at other hours

to her discreet and melancholy strains. He really knew little about

music, and the only criticism he would have made of Mrs. Ryves’s

conception of it was that she seemed devoted to the dismal. It was not,

however, that these strains were not pleasant to him; they floated up, on

the contrary, as a sort of conscious response to some of his broodings

and doubts. Harmony, therefore, would have reigned supreme had it not

been for the singularly bad taste of No. 4. Mrs. Ryves’s piano was on

the free side of the house and was regarded by Mrs. Bundy as open to no

objection but that of their own gentleman, who was so reasonable. As

much, however, could not be said of the gentleman of No. 4, who had not

even Mr. Baron’s excuse of being “littery” (he kept a bull-terrier and

had five hats—the street could count them), and whom, if you had listened

to Mrs. Bundy, you would have supposed to be divided from the obnoxious

instrument by walls and corridors, obstacles and intervals, of massive

structure and fabulous extent. This gentleman had taken up an attitude

which had now passed into the phase of correspondence and compromise; but

it was the opinion of the immediate neighbourhood that he had not a leg

to stand upon, and on whatever subject the sentiment of Jersey Villas

might have been vague, it was not so on the rights and the wrongs of

landladies.

Mrs. Ryves’s little boy was in the garden as Peter Baron issued from the

house, and his mother appeared to have come out for a moment, bareheaded,

to see that he was doing no harm. She was discussing with him the

responsibility that he might incur by passing a piece of string round one

of the iron palings and pretending he was in command of a “geegee”; but

it happened that at the sight of the other lodger the child was seized

with a finer perception of the drivable. He rushed at Baron with a

flourish of the bridle, shouting, “Ou geegee!” in a manner productive of

some refined embarrassment to his mother. Baron met his advance by

mounting him on a shoulder and feigning to prance an instant, so that by

the time this performance was over—it took but a few seconds—the young

man felt introduced to Mrs. Ryves. Her smile struck him as charming, and

such an impression shortens many steps. She said, “Oh, thank you—you

mustn’t let him worry you”; and then as, having put down the child and

raised his hat, he was turning away, she added: “It’s very good of you

not to complain of my piano.”

“I particularly enjoy it—you play beautifully,” said Peter Baron.

“I have to play, you see—it’s all I can do. But the people next door

don’t like it, though my room, you know, is not against their wall.

Therefore I thank you for letting me tell them that you, in the house,

don’t find me a nuisance.”

She looked gentle and bright as she spoke, and as the young man’s eyes

rested on her the tolerance for which she expressed herself indebted

seemed to him the least indulgence she might count upon. But he only

laughed and said “Oh, no, you’re not a nuisance!” and felt more and more

introduced.

The little boy, who was handsome, hereupon clamoured for another ride,

and she took him up herself, to moderate his transports. She stood a

moment with the child in her arms, and he put his fingers exuberantly

into her hair, so that while she smiled at Baron she slowly, permittingly

shook her head to get rid of them.

“If they really make a fuss I’m afraid I shall have to go,” she went on.

“Oh, don’t go!” Baron broke out, with a sudden expressiveness which made

his voice, as it fell upon his ear, strike him as the voice of another.

She gave a vague exclamation and, nodding slightly but not unsociably,

passed back into the house. She had made an impression which remained

till the other party to the conversation reached the railway-station,

when it was superseded by the thought of his prospective discussion with

Mr. Locket. This was a proof of the intensity of that interest.

The aftertaste of the later conference was also intense for Peter Baron,

who quitted his editor with his manuscript under his arm. He had had the

question out with Mr. Locket, and he was in a flutter which ought to have

been a sense of triumph and which indeed at first he succeeded in

regarding in this light. Mr. Locket had had to admit that there was an

idea in his story, and that was a tribute which Baron was in a position

to make the most of. But there was also a scene which scandalised the

editorial conscience and which the young man had promised to rewrite.

The idea that Mr. Locket had been so good as to disengage depended for

clearness mainly on this scene; so it was easy to see his objection was

perverse. This inference was probably a part of the joy in which Peter

Baron walked as he carried home a contribution it pleased him to classify

as accepted. He walked to work off his excitement and to think in what

manner he should reconstruct. He went some distance without settling

that point, and then, as it began to worry him, he looked vaguely into

shop-windows for solutions and hints. Mr. Locket lived in the depths of

Chelsea, in a little panelled, amiable house, and Baron took his way

homeward along the King’s Road. There was a new amusement for him, a

fresher bustle, in a London walk in the morning; these were hours that he

habitually spent at his table, in the awkward attitude engendered by the

poor piece of furniture, one of the rickety features of Mrs. Bundy’s

second floor, which had to serve as his altar of literary sacrifice. If

by exception he went out when the day was young he noticed that life

seemed younger with it; there were livelier industries to profit by and

shop-girls, often rosy, to look at; a different air was in the streets

and a chaff of traffic for the observer of manners to catch. Above all,

it was the time when poor Baron made his purchases, which were wholly of

the wandering mind; his extravagances, for some mysterious reason, were

all matutinal, and he had a foreknowledge that if ever he should ruin

himself it would be well before noon. He felt lavish this morning, on

the strength of what the Promiscuous would do for him; he had lost sight

for the moment of what he should have to do for the Promiscuous. Before

the old bookshops and printshops, the crowded panes of the

curiosity-mongers and the desirable exhibitions of mahogany “done up,” he

used, by an innocent process, to commit luxurious follies. He

refurnished Mrs. Bundy with a freedom that cost her nothing, and lost

himself in pictures of a transfigured second floor.

On this particular occasion the King’s Road proved almost unprecedentedly

expensive, and indeed this occasion differed from most others in

containing the germ of real danger. For once in a way he had a bad

conscience—he felt himself tempted to pick his own pocket. He never saw

a commodious writing-table, with elbow-room and drawers and a fair

expanse of leather stamped neatly at the edge with gilt, without being

freshly reminded of Mrs. Bundy’s dilapidations. There were several such

tables in the King’s Road—they seemed indeed particularly numerous today.

Peter Baron glanced at them all through the fronts of the shops, but

there was one that detained him in supreme contemplation. There was a

fine assurance about it which seemed a guarantee of masterpieces; but

when at last he went in and, just to help himself on his way, asked the

impossible price, the sum mentioned by the voluble vendor mocked at him

even more than he had feared. It was far too expensive, as he hinted,

and he was on the point of completing his comedy by a pensive retreat

when the shopman bespoke his attention for another article of the same

general character, which he described as remarkably cheap for what it

was. It was an old piece, from a sale in the country, and it had been in

stock some time; but it had got pushed out of sight in one of the upper

rooms—they contained such a wilderness of treasures—and happened to have

but just come to light. Peter suffered himself to be conducted into an

interminable dusky rear, where he presently found himself bending over

one of those square substantial desks of old mahogany, raised, with the

aid of front legs, on a sort of retreating pedestal which is fitted with

small drawers, contracted conveniences known immemorially to the knowing

as davenports. This specimen had visibly seen service, but it had an

old-time solidity and to Peter Baron it unexpectedly appealed.

He would have said in advance that such an article was exactly what he

didn’t want, but as the shopman pushed up a chair for him and he sat down

with his elbows on the gentle slope of the large, firm lid, he felt that

such a basis for literature would be half the battle. He raised the lid

and looked lovingly into the deep interior; he sat ominously silent while

his companion dropped the striking words: “Now that’s an article I

personally covet!” Then when the man mentioned the ridiculous price

(they were literally giving it away), he reflected on the economy of

having a literary altar on which one could really kindle a fire. A

davenport was a compromise, but what was all life but a compromise? He

could beat down the dealer, and at Mrs. Bundy’s he had to write on an

insincere card-table. After he had sat for a minute with his nose in the

friendly desk he had a queer impression that it might tell him a secret

or two—one of the secrets of form, one of the sacrificial

mysteries—though no doubt its career had been literary only in the sense

of its helping some old lady to write invitations to dull dinners. There

was a strange, faint odour in the receptacle, as if fragrant, hallowed

things had once been put away there. When he took his head out of it he

said to the shopman: “I don’t mind meeting you halfway.” He had been

told by knowing people that that was the right thing. He felt rather

vulgar, but the davenport arrived that evening at Jersey Villas.